In SO many replies that I see here, a common comment is "Did you let it rest?", "How long did you let it rest?" "You definitely didn't let that rest long enough."
Another thing that I've seen a lot here is that J. Kenji López-Alt is a highly respected expert on sous viding steaks. In this article (https://www.seriouseats.com/j-kenji-lopez-alt-5118720), he says:
Because a sous vide steak cooks from edge to edge with more or less perfect evenness, there is no temperature gradient inside. A medium-rare steak should be 130°F from the very center to the outer edge, with only the outer surfaces hotter after searing. Sous vide steaks can be served immediately after searing. The very minimal resting they need will happen on the way from the kitchen to the table.
Is he wrong here?
by enchant1
7 Comments
No he isn’t wrong, but also he is searing at a much higher temperature and a much shorter time than we probably are since his cast iron was in a 425 F oven
Resting is about allowing the temperature to even out so that the middle is cooked just right, but sous vide does that before searing, so he’s right. With a conventional hot grill, the temperature may not be even throughout.
You do not need to rest SV for any of the “juices to settle” or whatever people say about steaks coming off a grill.
However, searing increases the temperature of the food. So if you want to build a crust without cooking the inside, the cooler the meat, the more likely you are to develop a crust without raising the internal temperature, hence the rest / ice bath people say. It isn’t about the juices, it is about temp control during the sear.
For example. If you take steak out of SV at 130 and sear it, the internal might raise to 140. If you take it out and let it rest, it might drop to 120, then with sear, raise back up to 130. That is why you see the comments.
I’m not sure what you’ve been reading, but in this sub it’s about as close to unanimous as it can be that resting is not needed with sous vide.
Now – letting the steak ‘rest’ in the frig to dry it out before searing is a different animal. There are a billion ways to dry a steak before searing, and the sub also unanimously agrees that drying is key, whether that be letting the steak hang in the frig or freezer or patting dry or whatever. Others think to cool down a steak before searing although this is deliberated. That’s not a rest to get to a temperature equilibrium in the most common usage of the word when cooking meats.
I don’t know – following that logic, I sliced a whole picanha last night after SV (134 for 4 hours) and a quick cast iron sear. It basically rested for about a minute or two as I got out a cutting board and honed my slicing knife. I figured its about as thick as a legit big steak, so the same reasoning should apply.
Nope. Bled out all over the place. A true gutter-filler.
You rest in SV to cool down the surface before the sear, not to let the juices pull away from the surface like you would for a grill. Even than some testing has proven that false too.
You don’t need to rest meat that has been cooked sous vide. Lopez-Alt is absolutely correct about that. He often advocates for temperature/seasoning/time combinations that I personally don’t like, because they produce textures that I find unpalatable. But that’s a matter of taste, rather than a problem with his grip on the underlying technique. He’s VERY competent. Just in a way that I don’t emulate because my aesthetics are different.
I don’t really recommend him as a guide on sous vide, despite his technical competence. I think Douglas Baldwin’s material is better because Baldwin focuses on what is SAFE, and stays away from making pronouncements about what is pleasurable. I think this is an important distinction, because sous vide technique often results in odd textures, and Lopez-Alt often advises things that will give rise to said oddities (like salting prior to bagging, which cures the meat slightly and therefore imparts a change in texture).
There is a substantial minority of people who post to this sub who are unsophisticated cooks, and rely on sous vide technique because it’s formulaic and predictable. They’re not really undertaking much personal education about how sous vide changes the overall workflow for a given dish. They’re just subbing in a sous vide cook for a conventional one, and otherwise are doing everything else the same.